The New Orleans Pelicans almost gave up on Zion Williamson this season. Reports came out ahead of this past trade deadline that the team had made nearly the entire roster available in talks including Zion. They also came out with an unofficial shortlist of untouchable players that had four of their young players on it: Trey Murphy III, Herb Jones, Jordan Hawkins, and Yves Missi. Williamson's exclusion from that group was notable.
The Pelicans and their brass, including Executive Vice President David Griffin, can't be blamed for considering the thought of cutting bait with Zion. After all, they've lost their entire 2024-25 season to injuries, damnation that they've grown all too familiar with in the Zion Williamson era.
For the time being, it seems that New Orleans isn't quite ready to give up on the Zion experiment yet. Even after Trey Murphy III's ascension into stardom and this lost season that'll likely gift them a top draft pick in the loaded 2025 NBA Draft, the Pelicans held onto Zion at the trade deadline, sending a message that he's still the face of their franchise. That could feel like stagnation from the franchise, but this one stat gives valuable insight into why it's so hard to give up on Zion Williamson.
Stats show that Zion Williamson is perhaps the most unstoppable player in the NBA
We've known for years that when Zion Williamson is healthy, he can be the best player on the floor on any given night. Just last year, he led his Pelicans to a Play-In Tournament berth against the Los Angeles Lakers. Against two top-75 players of all time in LeBron James and Anthony Davis, with a playoff spot on the line, Zion left it all on the floor and put up a performance of a lifetime, dropping 40 points on 17-27 shooting to go along with 11 rebounds, five assists, and two stocks. He outdueled both LeBron and AD by far, but, ultimately, it wasn't enough. He'd go down with a hamstring strain late in the fourth quarter and have to watch from the sidelines as his Pelicans fell to the Lakers.
The scouting report has been out on Zion ever since the Pelicans picked him first in the 2019 NBA Draft: give him a cushion on the perimeter, wall off the paint, and send help to get the ball out of his hands. It's clear that there's no stopping him once he gets close to the rim, and stopping his progress once he gains momentum is a near-impossible task. The best bet for opposing defenses is to simply try to take away the paint completely or try to force him to give up the basketball with multiple defenders. Despite the loaded defenses he faces nightly, he still manages to put up All-NBA numbers on impeccable efficiency.
Even though the game plan to try to slow down Zion has been public knowledge for years, NBA statistician and writer Owen Phillips recently put out a graph that illustrated just how insanely dominant he's been in his career:
This graphic shows how often players command double teams from opposing defenses, with Williamson clearing the pack by a gaping margin, around 50 percent more than the next closest player. Phillips stated in a different post that the gap between Zion and the second-most double-teamed player was equal to the gap between the second-most double-teamed player and the 100th-most double-teamed player.
The fact that Zion has put up the numbers he has while facing multiple defenders on nearly 30 percent of his possessions is absolutely astounding. It truly highlights that Williamson is truly one of the all-time greats when he's healthy. When viewed through the lens that Phillips provided, he's completely peerless, alone on a mountaintop without a single challenger in sight.